Nintendo's newest old games

[Dark Jaguar]

http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2013/04/be...nostalgia/

Link to the Past sequel? Cool, but that's what the Oracle games and Link's Awakening are. This seems to take place before all of those though. It almost certainly will not feature Ganon.

It looks like Earthbound will finally be rereleased. Here's hoping they altered nothing, to finally kill off those ridiculous eBay prices.

[A Black Falcon]

Those are some interesting new announcements, I just hope that the games are good. But it's great to hear that there'll be a 3DS M&DK: March of the Minis game, the DS ones are great. The 3DS LttP 2 and Yoshi's Island titles... we'll see. I hope they're good. The DS Yoshi's Island DS game wasn't that great, hopefully this one is better.

Otherwise though, I find it annoying how that article focuses so much on how the games are "all sequels"... as if the fact that several of them all star Mario makes those very different kinds of games all the same or something? And the part near the end of the article where the author basically says that don't bother going to Nintendo for actual new ideas is a blatant lie, of course.

No matter how good these familiar titles are, though, it's highly unlikely that any of them are going to show us anything truly new and unique. While there may be cosmetic differences and tiny gameplay tweaks to the established formulas, you basically know what you're getting when you go in to one of these countless Nintendo franchise titles. Usually you're getting something good, but rarely are you getting something really surprising or innovative. That's probably enough to sustain the 3DS and Wii U on its own, but it's not really enough to get us truly excited about the future of games on Nintendo hardware.

Considering how often Nintendo mixes things up, makes new games with completely different gameplay styles that they help to sell by putting familiar characters on it, etc., it would be hard for this paragraph to be any less true than it is.

If the response is "but those are sequels"... well, how do you know how all of these games will play? Nintendo sequels have often changed things. But just because of the name, the author is assuming that they'll all be as similar as the New Super Mario Bros. games are, or something. It's not always like that, not at all!

[Dark Jaguar]

http://penny-arcade.com/report/article/z...ame-sequel

This is a slightly different take on it, if you want. Also, they're releasing a big firmware update for the Wii U. Looking forward to that.

[A Black Falcon]

Yeah, that article's much better.

Also, another Wii U update, huh? Wasn't there one not too long ago that cut down load times in system menus by quite a bit? I wonder what's next.

[A Black Falcon]

Okay, so the new Mario vs. Donkey Kong game is basically Pipe Dream, but with mini Marios? That's too bad, I've never really liked Pipe Dream, but the Lemmings-like MvDK games for the DS were great... I'd love to see another one of those. This though? I'll probably pass. Pipe Dream is just so frustrating...

[Dark Jaguar]

ABF, the last update didn't fix the load time issues. The upcoming one will do that. I NEVER have a problem with frequent updates, so long as the update process itself is quick and smooth. The 360 USED to have that sort of quickness, and the 3DS DOES have that sort of quickness.

Besides, there's still a lot that needs fixing on the Wii U. Wii games, for example, shouldn't require the original Wii OS to load up before they can be run.

One of the updates will allow FUTURE updates to install themselves while the system is "off", so that will cut down on things too.

I'm fairly good at pipe dream, but it does get reused a little often. Bioshock, for example, used it in yet another nonsensical "hacking" mini-game. (Nothing about hacking has ever even remotely resembled a hacking mini-game. They tend to make the little girl in Jurassic Park "hacking" the 3D representation of an OS (which she somehow instantly "recognized" as Unix) seem brilliant by comparison.) With any luck, they'll introduce some fun game mechanics to spice up the formula. That said, I miss the Gameboy Donkey Kong style of the original Mario vs. Donkey Kong.

[A Black Falcon]

Ah, the last update didn't include that load times change? I misunderstood then.

As for Pipe Dream, I first played the game back in the early '90s, and didn't like it all that much. And yeah, I still don't really. Going by the video this version does have some new features, such as large maps with a bunch of obstacles and stuff to collect and stuff, so it's not just straight Pipe Dream, and as with some of the DS games it'll have online level sharing too, which is great, but the base gameplay is still Pipe Dream. Blah.

As for the GBA game, it was good, but I actually like the DS games more; the GBA game may have been good, but it was nowhere near as good as the GB original (Donkey Kong). In comparison, the DS Lemmingsesque puzzle games were quite fun. I got thoroughly addicted to the second DS one last year, didn't stop playing until I'd beaten every puzzle in the game.

[Dark Jaguar]

Well, with Mario vs Donkey Kong on GBA, they made sure the new "friendlier" Donkey Kong was only stealing toys, not people. Unfortunately, the DS games went through all the trouble of bringing back our lady Pauline only to have her get kidnapped by DK. Sure, it's because he wanted a Pauline doll and had to "settle" for the real thing, but all the same, kinda annoying. So she's supposed to be an actor, here's hoping they'll come up with a game starring Pauline where you "play" through a series of movie scripts. That'd be neat.

[A Black Falcon]

Hey, hey, Nintendo may be adding female characters in a bunch of games in order to attract more female gamers (see the added female characters in Pikmin 3, DKCR 2, SM3DW, and SSBB), but platformer games starring female characters? Yeah, NCL itself has done that, like... never? Unless you count Metroid, everything I can think of was developed by other branches of Nintendo or outside studios, like Balloon Kid, DKC3, DKL3, and Drill Dozer.

[Dark Jaguar]

It was only a fool's hope...

[A Black Falcon]

I'm with you on hoping for that, I just don't expect it, at least not as long as Miyamoto and co. have writing control. 'Boy rescues girl' is still his standard go-to plot, I think.